Well-Being

First published Tue Nov 6, 2001; substantive revision Wed May 8, 2013

Well-being is most commonly used in philosophy to describe what is
non-instrumentally or ultimately good for a person. The
question of what well-being consists in is of independent interest,
but it is of great importance in moral philosophy, especially in the
case of utilitarianism, according to which well-being is to be
maximized. Significant challenges to the very notion have been mounted,
in particular by G.E. Moore and T.M. Scanlon. It has become standard
to distinguish theories of well-being as either hedonist theories,
desire theories, or objective list theories. According to the view
known as welfarism, well-being is the only value. Also important in
ethics is the question of how a person’s moral character and actions relate to their well-being.

Popular use of the term ‘well-being’ usually relates to
health. A doctor’s surgery may run a ‘Women’s
Well-being Clinic’, for example. Philosophical use is broader,
but related, and amounts to the notion of how well a person’s
life is going for that person. A person’s well-being is what is
‘good for’ them. Health, then, might be said to be a
constituent of my well-being, but it is not plausibly taken to be all
that matters for my well-being. One correlate term worth noting here
is ‘self-interest’: my self-interest is what is in the
interest of myself, and not others.

The philosophical use of the term also tends to encompass the
‘negative’ aspects of how a person’s life goes for
them. So we may speak of the well-being of someone who is, and will
remain in, the most terrible agony: their well-being is negative, and
such that their life is worse for them than no life at all. The same
is true of closely allied terms, such as ‘welfare’, which
covers how a person is faring as a whole, whether well or badly, or
‘happiness’, which can be understood—as it was by
the classical utilitarians from Jeremy Bentham onwards, for
example—to be the balance between good and bad things in a
person’s life. But note that philosophers also use such terms in the
more standard ‘positive’ way, speaking of
‘ill-being’, ‘ill-faring’, or, of course,
‘unhappiness’ to capture the negative aspects of
individuals’ lives.

‘Happiness’ is often used, in ordinary life, to refer to a
short-lived state of a person, frequently a feeling of contentment:
‘You look happy today’; ‘I’m very happy for
you’. Philosophically, its scope is more often wider,
encompassing a whole life. And in philosophy it is possible to speak
of the happiness of a person’s life, or of their happy life,
even if that person was in fact usually pretty miserable. The point
is that some good things in their life made it a happy one, even
though they lacked contentment. But this usage is uncommon, and may cause confusion.

Over the last few decades, so-called ‘positive psychology’
has hugely increased the attention paid by psychologists and other
scientists to the notion of ‘happiness’. Such happiness is
usually understood in terms of contentment or
‘life-satisfaction’, and is measured by means such as
self-reports or daily questionnaires. Is positive psychology about
well-being? As yet, conceptual distinctions are not sufficiently clear
within the discipline. But it is probably fair to say that many of
those involved, as researchers or as subjects, are assuming that one’s
life goes well to the extent that one is contented with it—that
is, that some kind of hedonistic account of well-being is
correct. Some positive psychologists, however, explicitly reject
hedonistic theories in preference to Aristotelian or
‘eudaimonist’ accounts of well-being, which are a version
of the ‘objective list’ theory of well-being discussed
below. A leader in the field, Martin Seligman, for example, has
recently suggested that, rather than happiness, positive psychology
should concern itself with positive emotion, engagement,
relationships, meaning and accomplishment (‘Perma’)
(Seligman 2011).

When discussing the notion of what makes life good for the individual
living that life, it is preferable to use the term
‘well-being’ instead of ‘happiness’. For we want
at least to allow conceptual space for the possibility that, for
example, the life of a plant may be ‘good for’ that
plant. And speaking of the happiness of a plant would be stretching
language too far. (An alternative here might be
‘flourishing’, though this might be taken to bias the
analysis of human well-being in the direction of some kind of natural
teleology.) In that respect, the Greek word commonly translated
‘happiness’ (eudaimonia) might be thought to be
superior. But, in fact, eudaimonia seems to have
been restricted not only to conscious beings, but to human beings: non-human animals
cannot be eudaimon. This is because eudaimonia
suggests that the gods, or fortune, have favoured one, and the idea
that the gods could care about non-humans would not have occurred to
most Greeks.

It is occasionally claimed that certain ancient ethical theories,
such as Aristotle’s, result in the collapse of the very notion of
well-being. On Aristotle’s view, if you are my friend, then my
well-being is closely bound up with yours. It might be tempting, then,
to say that ‘your’ well-being is ‘part’ of
mine, in which case the distinction between what is good for me and
what is good for others has broken down. But this temptation should be
resisted. Your well-being concerns how well your life goes for you, and
we can allow that my well-being depends on yours without introducing
the confusing notion that my well-being is constituted by yours. There
are signs in Aristotelian thought of an expansion of the subject or
owner of well-being. A friend is ‘another self’, so that
what benefits my friend benefits me. But this should be taken either as
a metaphorical expression of the dependence claim, or as an identity
claim which does not threaten the notion of well-being: if you really
are the same person as I am, then of course what is good for you will
be what is good for me, since there is no longer any metaphysically
significant distinction between you and me.

Well-being is a kind of value, sometimes called ‘prudential
value’, to be distinguished from, for example, aesthetic value
or moral value. What marks it out is the notion of ‘good
for’. The serenity of a Vermeer painting, for example, is a kind
of goodness, but it is not ‘good for’ the painting. It may
be good for us to contemplate such serenity, but contemplating
serenity is not the same as the serenity itself. Likewise, my giving
money to a development charity may have moral value, that is, be
morally good. And the effects of my donation may be good for
others. But it remains an open question whether my being morally good
is good for me; and, if it is, its being good for me is still
conceptually distinct from its being morally good.

There is something mysterious about the notion of ‘good
for’. Consider a possible world that contains only a single
item: a stunning Vermeer painting. Leave aside any doubts you might
have about whether paintings can be good in a world without viewers,
and accept for the sake of argument that this painting has aesthetic
value in that world. It seems intuitively plausible to claim that
the value of this world is constituted solely by the aesthetic value
of the painting. But now consider a world which contains one
individual living a life that is good for them. How are to describe
the relationship between the value of this world, and the value of the
life lived in it for the individual? Are we to say that the world has
a value at all? How can it, if the only value it contains is
‘good for’ as opposed to just ‘good’? And yet
we surely do want to say that this world is better (‘more
good’) than some other empty world. Well, should we say that the
world is good, and is so because of the good it contains
‘for’ the individual? This fails to capture the idea that
there is in fact nothing of value in this world except what is good for
the individual.

Thoughts such as these led G.E. Moore to object to the very idea of
‘good for’ (Moore 1903, pp. 98–9). Moore argued that the
idea of ‘my own good’, which he saw as equivalent to what
is ‘good for me’, makes no sense. When I speak of, say,
pleasure as what is good for me, he claimed, I can mean only either
that the pleasure I get is good, or that my getting it is good.
Nothing is added by saying that the pleasure constitutes my good, or
is good for me.

But the distinctions I drew between different categories of value
above show that Moore’s analysis of the claim that my own good
consists in pleasure is too narrow. Indeed Moore’s argument
rests on the very assumption that it seeks to prove: that only the
notion of ‘good’ is necessary to make all the evaluative
judgements we might wish to make. The claim that it is good that I
get pleasure is, logically speaking, equivalent to the claim that the
world containing the single Vermeer is good. It is, so to speak,
‘impersonal’, and leaves out of account the special feature
of the value of well-being: that it is good for individuals.

Indeed, one way to respond both to Moore’s challenge, and to the
puzzles above, is to try, when appropriate, to do without the notion
of ‘good’ (see Kraut 2011) and make do with ‘good for’,
alongside the separate and non-evaluative notion of reasons for
action. Thus, the world containing the single individual with a life
worth living, might be said to contain nothing good per se,
but a life that is good for that individual. And this fact may give us
a reason to bring about such a world, given the opportunity.

Moore’s book was published in Cambridge, England, at the
beginning of the twentieth century. At the end of the same century, a
book was published in Cambridge, Mass., which also posed some serious
challenges to the notion of well-being: What Do We Owe to Each
Other?, by T.M. Scanlon.

Moore’s ultimate aim in criticizing the idea of ‘goodness
for’ was to attack egoism. Likewise, Scanlon has an ulterior
motive in objecting to the notion of well-being—to attack
so-called ‘teleological’ or end-based theories of ethics, in
particular, utilitarianism, which in its standard form requires us to
maximize well-being. But in both cases the critiques stand
independently.

One immediately odd aspect of Scanlon’s position that
‘well-being’ is an otiose notion in ethics is that he
himself seems to have a view on what well-being is. It involves, he
believes, among other things, success in one’s rational aims, and
personal relations. But Scanlon claims that his view is not a
‘theory of well-being’, since a theory must explain what
unifies these different elements, and how they are to be
compared. And, he adds, no such theory is ever likely to be available,
since such matters depend so much on context.

Scanlon does, however, implicitly make a claim about what unites
these values: they are all constituents of well-being, as opposed to
other kinds of value, such as aesthetic or moral. Nor is it clear why
Scanlon’s view of well-being could not be developed so as to
assist in making real-life choices between different values in
one’s own life.

Scanlon suggests that we often make claims about what is good in our
lives without referring to the notion of well-being, and indeed that
it would often be odd to do so. For example, I might say, ‘I
listen to Alison Krauss’s music because I enjoy it’, and
that will be sufficient. I do not need to go on to say, ‘And
enjoyment adds to my well-being’.

But this latter claim sounds peculiar only because we already
know that enjoyment makes a person’s life better for
them. And in some circumstances such a claim would anyway not be odd:
consider an argument with someone who claims that aesthetic
experience is worthless, or with an ascetic. Further, people do use
the notion of well-being in practical thinking. For example, if I am
given the opportunity to achieve something significant, which will
involve considerable discomfort over several years, I may consider
whether, from the point of view of my own well-being, the project is
worth pursuing.

Scanlon argues also that the notion of well-being, if it is to be
philosophically acceptable, ought to provide a ‘sphere of
compensation’—a context in which it makes sense to say,
for example, that I am losing one good in my life for the sake of
gain over my life as a whole. And, he claims, there is no such
sphere. For Scanlon, giving up present comfort for the sake of future
health ‘feels like a sacrifice’.

But this does not chime with my own experience. When I donate blood,
this feels to me like a sacrifice. But when I visit the dentist, it
feels to me just as if I am weighing up present pains against
potential future pains. And we can weigh up different components of
well-being against one another. Consider a case in which you are
offered a job which is highly paid but many miles away from your friends and
family.

Scanlon denies that we need an account of well-being to understand
benevolence, since we do not have a general duty of benevolence, but
merely duties to benefit others in specific ways, such as to relieve
their pain. But, from the philosophical perspective, it may be quite
useful to use the heading of ‘benevolence’ in order to
group such duties. And, again, comparisons may be important: if I
have several pro tanto duties of benevolence, not all of
which can be fulfilled, I shall have to weigh up the various benefits
I can provide against one another. And here the notion of well-being
will again come into play.

Further, if morality includes so-called ’imperfect’ duties
to benefit others, that is, duties that allow the agent some
discretion as to when and how to assist, the lack of any overarching
conception of well-being is likely to make the fulfillment of such
duties problematic.

On one view, human beings always act in pursuit of what they think
will give them the greatest balance of pleasure over pain. This is
‘psychological hedonism’, and will not be my concern
here. Rather, I intend to discuss ‘evaluative hedonism’ or
‘prudential hedonism’, according to which well-being
consists in the greatest balance of pleasure over pain.

This view was first, and perhaps most famously, expressed by Socrates
and Protagoras in the Platonic dialogue, Protagoras (Plato
1976 [C4 BCE], 351b–c). Jeremy Bentham, perhaps the most well-known
of the more recent hedonists, begins his Introduction to the
Principles of Morals and Legislation thus: ‘Nature has
placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters,
pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point
out what we ought to do’.

In answer to the question, ‘What does well-being consist
in?’, then, the hedonist will answer, ‘The greatest
balance of pleasure over pain’. We might call this
substantive hedonism. A complete hedonist position will
involve also explanatory hedonism, which consists in an answer to
the following question: ‘What makes pleasure good, and
pain bad?’, that answer being, ‘The pleasantness of
pleasure, and the painfulness of pain’. Consider a substantive
hedonist who believed that what makes pleasure good for us is that it
fulfills our nature. This theorist is not an explanatory hedonist.

Hedonism—as is demonstrated by its ancient roots—has
long seemed an obviously plausible view. Well-being, what is good
for me, might be thought to be naturally linked to what
seems good to me, and pleasure does, to most people, seem
good. And how could anything else benefit me except in so far as I enjoy
it?

The simplest form of hedonism is Bentham’s, according to which
the more pleasantness one can pack into one’s life, the better
it will be, and the more painfulness one encounters, the worse it
will be. How do we measure the value of the two experiences? The two
central aspects of the respective experiences, according to Bentham,
are their duration, and their intensity.

Bentham tended to think of pleasure and pain as a kind of sensation,
as the notion of intensity might suggest. One problem with this kind
of hedonism is that there does not appear to be a single common
strand of pleasantness running through all the different experiences
people enjoy, such as eating hamburgers, reading Shakespeare, or
playing water polo. Rather, it seems, there are certain experiences we
want to continue, and we might be prepared to call these—for
philosophical purposes—pleasures (even though some of them,
such as diving in a very deep and narrow cave, for example, would not
normally be described as pleasurable).

But simple hedonism could survive this objection merely by
incorporating whatever view of pleasure was thought to be
plausible. A more serious objection is to the evaluative stance of
hedonism itself. Thomas Carlyle, for example, described the
hedonistic component of utilitarianism as the ‘philosophy of
swine’, the point being that simple hedonism places all
pleasures on a par, whether they be the lowest animal pleasures of
sex or the highest of aesthetic appreciation. One might make this
point with a thought experiment. Imagine that you are given the
choice of living a very fulfilling human life, or that of a barely
sentient oyster, which experiences some very low-level
pleasure. Imagine also that the life of the oyster can be as long as
you like, whereas the human life will be of eighty years only. If
Bentham were right, there would have to be a length of oyster life
such that you would choose it in preference to the human. And yet
many say that they would choose the human life in preference to an
oyster life of any length.

Now this is not a knockdown argument against simple hedonism. Indeed
some people are ready to accept that at some length or other the
oyster life becomes preferable. But there is an alternative to simple
hedonism, outlined famously by J.S. Mill, using his distinction
(itself influenced by Plato’s discussion of pleasure at the end
of his Republic (Plato 1992 [C4 BCE], 582d-583a)) between
‘higher’ and ‘lower’ pleasures (1998 [1863],
ch. 2). Mill added a third property to the two determinants of value
identified by Bentham, duration and intensity. To distinguish it from
these two ‘quantitative’ properties, Mill called his third
property ‘quality’. The claim is that some pleasures, by
their very nature, are more valuable than others. For example, the
pleasure of reading Shakespeare, by its very nature, is more valuable
than any amount of basic animal pleasure. And we can see this, Mill
suggests, if we note that those who have experienced both types, and
are ‘competent judges’, will make their choices on this
basis.

A long-standing objection to Mill’s move here has been to claim that
his position can no longer be described as hedonism proper (or what I
have called ‘explanatory hedonism’). If higher pleasures
are higher because of their nature, that aspect of their nature cannot
be pleasantness, since that could be determined by duration and
intensity alone. And Mill anyway speaks of properties such as
‘nobility’ as adding to the value of a pleasure. Now it
has to be admitted that Mill is sailing close to the wind here. But
there is logical space for a hedonist position which allows properties
such as nobility to determine pleasantness, and insists that only
pleasantness determines value. But one might well wonder how nobility
could affect pleasantness, and why Mill did not just come out with the
idea that nobility is itself a good-making property.

But there is a yet more weighty objection to hedonism of any kind: the
so-called ‘experience machine’. Imagine that I have a
machine that I could plug you into for the rest of your life. This
machine would give you experiences of whatever kind you thought most
valuable or enjoyable—writing a great novel, bringing about
world peace, attending an early Rolling Stones’ gig. You would not
know you were on the machine, and there is no worry about its breaking
down or whatever. Would you plug in? Would it be wise, from the point
of your own well-being, to do so? Robert Nozick thinks it would be a
big mistake to plug in: ‘We want to do certain things …
we want to be a certain way … plugging into an experience
machine limits us to a man-made reality’ (Nozick 1974,
p. 43).

One can make the machine sound more palatable, by allowing that
genuine choices can be made on it, that those plugged in have access
to a common ‘virtual world’ shared by other machine-users,
a world in which ‘ordinary’ communication is possible, and
so on. But this will not be enough for many anti-hedonists. A further
line of response begins from so-called ‘externalism’ in the
philosophy of mind, according to which the content of mental states
is determined by facts external to the experiencer of those
states. Thus, the experience of really writing a great novel
is quite different from that of apparently writing a great
novel, even though ‘from the inside’ they may be
indistinguishable. But this is once again sailing close to the
wind. If the world can affect the very content of my experience
without my being in a position to be aware of it, why should it not
affect the value of my experience?

The strongest tack for hedonists to take is to accept the apparent
force of the experience machine objection, but to insist that it
rests on ‘common sense’ intuitions, the place in our lives
of which may itself be justified by hedonism. This is to adopt a
strategy similar to that developed by ‘two-level
utilitarians’ in response to alleged counter-examples based on
common-sense morality. The hedonist will point out the so-called
‘paradox of hedonism’, that pleasure is most effectively
pursued indirectly. If I consciously try to maximize my own
pleasure, I will be unable to immerse myself in those activities,
such as reading or playing games, which do give pleasure. And if we
believe that those activities are valuable independently of the
pleasure we gain from engaging in them, then we shall probably gain
more pleasure overall.

These kinds of stand-off in moral philosophy are unfortunate, but
should not be brushed aside. They raise questions concerning the
epistemology of ethics, and the source and epistemic status of our
deepest ethical beliefs, which we are further from answering than
many would like to think. Certainly the current trend of quickly
dismissing hedonism on the basis of a quick run-through of the
experience machine objection is not methodologically sound.

The experience machine is one motivation for the adoption of a desire
theory. When you are on the machine, many of your central desires are
likely to remain unfilled. Take your desire to write a great
novel. You may believe that this is what you are doing, but in fact
it is just a hallucination. And what you want, the argument goes, is
to write a great novel, not the experience of writing a great
novel.

Historically, however, the reason for the current dominance of desire
theories lies in the emergence of welfare economics. Pleasure and pain
are inside people’s heads, and also hard to measure—especially
when we have to start weighing different people’s experiences against
one another. So economists began to see people’s well-being as
consisting in the satisfaction of preferences or desires, the content
of which could be revealed by their possessors. This made possible the
ranking of preferences, the development of ‘utility
functions’ for individuals, and methods for assessing the value
of preference-satisfaction (using, for example, money as a
standard).

The simplest version of a desire theory one might call the
present desire theory, according to which someone is made
better off to the extent that their current desires are
fulfilled. This theory does succeed in avoiding the experience
machine objection. But it has serious problems of its own. Consider
the case of the angry adolescent. This boy’s mother
tells him he cannot attend a certain nightclub, so the boy holds a
gun to his own head, wanting to pull the trigger and retaliate
against his mother. Recall that the scope of theories of well-being
should be the whole of a life. It is implausible that the boy will
make his life go as well as possible by pulling the trigger. We might
perhaps interpret the simple desire theory as a theory of
well-being-at-at-a-particular-time. But even then it seems
unsatisfactory. From whatever perspective, the boy would be better
off if he put the gun down.

We should move, then, to a comprehensive desire theory,
according to which what matters to a person’s well-being is the
overall level of desire-satisfaction in their life as a whole. A
summative version of this theory suggests, straightforwardly
enough, that the more desire-fulfilment in a life the better. But it
runs into Derek Parfit’s case of addiction (1984, p.
497). Imagine that you can start taking a highly addictive drug, which
will cause a very strong desire in you for the drug every morning.
Taking the drug will give you no pleasure; but not taking it will
cause you quite severe suffering. There will be no problem with the
availability of the drug, and it will cost you nothing. But what
reason do you have to take it?

A global version of the comprehensive theory ranks desires,
so that desires about the shape and content of one’s life as a
whole are given some priority. So, if I prefer not to become a drug
addict, that will explain why it is better for me not to take
Parfit’s drug. But now consider the case of the orphan
monk. This young man began training to be a monk at the earliest
age, and has lived a very sheltered life. He is now offered three
choices: he can remain as a monk, or become either a cook or a
gardener outside the monastery, at a grange. He has no conception of
the latter alternatives, so chooses to remain a monk. But surely it
might be possible that he would have a better life were he to live
outside?

So we now have to move to an informed desire version of the
comprehensive theory. According to the informed desire account, the
best life is the one I would desire if I were fully informed about
all the (non-evaluative) facts. But now consider a case suggested by
John Rawls: the grass-counter. Imagine a brilliant Harvard
mathematician, fully informed about the options available to her, who
develops an overriding desire to count the blades of grass on the
lawns of Harvard. Like the experience machine, this case is
another example of philosophical ‘bedrock’. Some will
believe that, if she really is informed, and not suffering from some
neurosis, then the life of grass-counting will be the best for
her.

Note that on the informed desire view the subject must actually have the desires in question for well-being to accrue to her. If it were true of me that, were I fully informed I would desire some object which at present I have no desire for, giving me that object now would not benefit me. Any theory which claimed that it would amounts to an objective list theory with a desire-based epistemology.

All these problem cases for desire theories appear to be symptoms of a more general difficulty. Recall again the distinction between substantive and formal theories of well-being. The former state the constituents of well-being (such as pleasure), while the
latter state what makes these things good for people (pleasantness, for example). Substantively, a desire theorist and a hedonist may agree on what makes life good for people: pleasurable experiences. But formally they will differ: the hedonist will refer
to pleasantness as the good-maker, while the desire theorist must refer to desire-satisfaction. (It is worth pointing out here that if one characterizes pleasure as an experience the subject wants to continue, the distinction between hedonism and desire theories becomes quite hard to pin down.)

The idea that desire-satisfaction is a ‘good-making
property’ is somewhat odd. As Aristotle says (1984 [C4 BCE],
Metaphysics, 1072a, tr. Ross): ‘desire is consequent on
opinion rather than opinion on desire’. In other words, we
desire things, such as writing a great novel, because we think those
things are independently good; we do not think they are good because
they will satisfy our desire for them.

The threefold distinction I am using between different theories of
well-being has become standard in contemporary ethics. There are
problems with it, however, as with many classifications, since it can
blind one to other ways of characterizing views. Objective list
theories are usually understood as theories which list items
constituting well-being that consist neither merely in pleasurable
experience nor in desire-satisfaction. Such items might include, for
example, knowledge or friendship. But it is worth remembering, for
example, that hedonism might be seen as one kind of ‘list’
theory, and all list theories might then be opposed to desire
theories as a whole.

What should go on the list? It is important that every good should be
included. As Aristotle put it: ‘We take what is self-sufficient
to be that which on its own makes life worthy of choice and lacking in
nothing. We think happiness to be such, and indeed the thing most of
all worth choosing, not counted as just one thing among others’
(2000 [C4 BCE], Nicomachean Ethics, 1197b, tr. Crisp). In
other words, if you claim that well-being consists only in friendship
and pleasure, I can show your list to be unsatisfactory if I can
demonstrate that knowledge is also something that makes people better
off.

What is the ‘good-maker’, according to objective list
theorists? This depends on the theory. One, influenced by Aristotle
and recently developed by Thomas Hurka (1993), is
perfectionism, according to which what makes things
constituents of well-being is their perfecting human nature. If it is
part of human nature to acquire knowledge, for example, then a
perfectionist should claim that knowledge is a constituent of
well-being. But there is nothing to prevent an objective list
theorist’s claiming that all that the items on her list have in
common is that each, in its own way, advances well-being.

How do we decide what goes on the list? All we can work on is the
deliverance of reflective judgement—intuition, if you
like. But one should not conclude from this that objective list
theorists are, because they are intuitionist, less satisfactory than
the other two theories. For those theories too can be based only on
reflective judgement. Nor should one think that intuitionism rules
out argument. Argument is one way to bring people to see the
truth. Further, we should remember that intuitions can be
mistaken. Indeed, as suggested above, this is the strongest line of
defence available to hedonists: to attempt to undermine the
evidential weight of many of our natural beliefs about what is good
for people.

One common objection to objective list theories is that they are
élitist, since they appear to be claiming that certain things
are good for people, even if those people will not enjoy them, and do
not even want them. One strategy here might be to adopt a
‘hybrid’ account, according to which certain goods do
benefit people independently of pleasure and desire-satisfaction, but
only when they do in fact bring pleasure and/or satisfy desires.
Another would be to bite the bullet, and point out that a theory
could be both élitist and true.

It is also worth pointing out that objective list theories need not
involve any kind of objectionable authoritarianism or perfectionism.
First, one might wish to include autonomy on one’s list,
claiming that the informed and reflective living of one’s own
life for oneself itself constitutes a good. Second, and perhaps
more significantly, one might note that any theory of well-being in
itself has no direct moral implications. There is nothing logically
to prevent one’s holding a highly élitist conception of
well-being alongside a strict liberal view that forbade paternalistic
interference of any kind with a person’s own life (indeed, on
some interpretations, J.S. Mill’s position is close to
this).

One not implausible view, if desire theories are indeed mistaken in
their reversal of the relation between desire and what is good, is
that the debate is really between hedonism and objective list
theories. And, as suggested above, what is most at stake here is the
issue of the epistemic adequacy of our beliefs about well-being. The
best way to resolve this matter would consist, in large part at
least, in returning once again to the experience machine objection,
and seeking to discover whether that objection really stands.

Well-being obviously plays a central role in any moral theory. A
theory which said that it just does not matter would be given no
credence at all. Indeed, it is very tempting to think that
well-being, in some ultimate sense, is all that can matter
morally. Consider, for example, Joseph Raz’s ‘humanistic
principle’: ‘the explanation and justification of the
goodness or badness of anything derives ultimately from its
contribution, actual or possible, to human life and its quality’
(Raz 1986, p. 194). If we expand this principle to cover non-human
well-being, it might be read as claiming that, ultimately speaking,
the justificatory force of any moral reason rests on well-being. This
view is welfarism.

Act-utilitarians, who believe that the right action is that which
maximizes well-being overall, may attempt to use the intuitive
plausibility of welfarism to support their position, arguing that any
deviation from the maximization of well-being must be grounded on
something distinct from well-being, such as equality or rights. But
those defending equality may argue that egalitarians are concerned to
give priority to those who are worse off, and that we do see here a
link with concern for well-being. Likewise, those concerned with
rights may note that rights are to certain goods, such as freedom, or
the absence of ‘bads’, such as suffering (in the case of
the right not to be tortured, for example). In other words, the
interpretation of welfarism is itself a matter of dispute. But,
however it is understood, it does seem that welfarism poses a problem
for those who believe that morality can require actions which benefit
no one, and harm some, such as, for example, punishments intended to
give individuals what they deserve.

Ancient ethics was, in a sense, more concerned with well-being than a
good deal of modern ethics, the central question for many ancient
moral philosophers being, ‘Which life is best for one?’.
The rationality of egoism—the view that my strongest reason
is always to advance my own well-being—was largely
assumed. This posed a problem. Morality is naturally thought to
concern the interests of others. So if egoism is correct, what reason
do I have to be moral?

One obvious strategy to adopt in defence of morality is to claim that
a person’s well-being is in some sense constituted by their
virtue, or the exercise of virtue, and this strategy was adopted in
subtly different ways by the three greatest ancient philosophers,
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. At one point in his writings, Plato
appears to allow for the rationality of moral self-sacrifice: the
philosophers in his famous ‘cave’ analogy in the
Republic (519–20) are required by morality to desist from
contemplation of the sun outside the cave, and to descend once again
into the cave to govern their fellow citizens. In the voluminous works
of Aristotle, however, there is no recommendation of sacrifice.
Aristotle believed that he could defend the virtuous choice as always
being in the interest of the individual. Note, however, that he need
not be described as an egoist in a strong sense—as someone who
believes that our only reasons for action are grounded in our own
well-being. For him, virtue both tends to advance the good of others,
and (at least when acted on) advances our own good. So Aristotle might
well have allowed that the well-being of others grounds reasons for me
to act. But these reasons will never come into conflict with reasons
grounded in my own individual well-being.

His primary argument is his notorious and perfectionist
‘function argument’, according to which the good for some
being is to be identified through attention to its
‘function’ or characteristic activity. The characteristic
activity of human beings is to exercise reason, and the good will lie
in exercising reason well—that is, in accordance with the
virtues. This argument, which is stated by Aristotle very briefly and
relies on assumptions from elsewhere in his philosophy and indeed that
of Plato, appears to conflate the two ideas of what is good for a
person, and what is morally good. I may agree that a
‘good’ example of humanity will be virtuous, but deny that
this person is doing what is best for them. Rather, I may insist,
reason requires one to advance one’s own good, and this good consists
in, for example, pleasure, power, or honour. But much of
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is taken up with portraits of
the life of the virtuous and the vicious, which supply independent
support for the claim that well-being is constituted by virtue. In
particular, it is worth noting the emphasis placed by Aristotle on the
value to a person of ‘nobility’ (to kalon), a
quasi-aesthetic value which those sensitive to such qualities might
not implausibly see as a constituent of well-being of more worth than
any other. In this respect, the good of virtue is, in the Kantian
sense, ‘unconditional’. Yet, for Aristotle, virtue or the
‘good will’ is not only morally good, but good for the
individual.

Some significant recent works are Griffin (1986) and Finnis (2011),
which present different objective lists, Feldman (2004) and Crisp
(2006, which defend hedonism, Sumner (1996), which rejects many
current options and advocates a theory of well-being based on the idea
of ‘life-satisfaction’, Kraut (2007), which develops a
broadly Aristotelian account, and Haybron (2008) and Tiberius (2008),
which address issues that arise in contemporary psychological research
on happiness. A collection of useful essays is Nussbaum and Sen
(1993).